The Fleet Street Murders

by Charles Finch

  Instead he opened his case again and took two small tools from it. Fortune was on his side; it was an old-fashioned lock, and within about a minute he had managed to jiggle it open. As he had expected, it wasn’t impossibly hard to break into the building (and a good detective, as he had once said to Graham, always needs to be in some small part a good housebreaker, too).

  He imagined the vaults would be a different story.

  With slow, careful steps he walked up the stairway in front of the door, ignoring the caretaker’s closet to the left. At the top of the stairway was another door, and opening it he found himself in a wide, marble-floored corridor, which he saw in the dim moonlight was of regal bearing, with busts of past Mint Officials and portraits of past monarchs along the walls.

  He paused, suddenly slightly discouraged. He hadn’t any clue how many night guards there were here, or what their beats were, and he hadn’t any clue either where he would find George Barnard. Or if he would find George Barnard. Somehow in his own bed it had seemed so intuitive, so correct, that the man would return to the place he had been most comfortable. The illusion of fleeing London had seemed to dovetail so well with his insight—and the fact of his keeping an office here—his long history of thievery—his emptied bank accounts.

  Now, however, it all seemed insubstantial, even implausible.

  His nerves on edge, Lenox stepped into the hallway. He had worn his soft-soled boots, which were much quieter than his others, but he still made noise. Walking west down the corridor, toward where he knew the Master’s office to be, he stopped to examine the brass nameplates on each of the doors of the nicest offices. None of them bore a name he knew, and he decided to turn left at the corner.

  Suddenly, he heard a soft whistling.

  He froze and then pressed himself tight up against the wall. The sound drew closer and closer, coming toward him, and soon he saw coming from the corner he had meant to turn a guard, clad in black.

  Just as this guard was about to discover the Mint’s intruder, however, he abruptly stopped. Lenox saw him check his watch and turn on his heel to walk in the other direction.

  His heart blazing, the detective forced himself to gulp deep breaths of air and steady his frayed nerves. He let one minute pass, then two minutes, then three. Finally he decided to go.

  Just as he stepped away from the wall, an arrogant, cultivated voice spoke.

  “Charles Lenox!” said the voice with a smile in it. “Now what on earth could you be doing here?”

  Lenox turned, his hands raised.

  The security guard stood there—and beside him the man who had spoken. George Barnard.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  C

  ouldn’t sleep,” said Lenox with the hint of a smile, his hands still raised. “Thought I’d go for a walk.”

  “I can’t congratulate you on the place you chose for it,” said Barnard, hands clasped behind his back.

  Lenox decided to speak to the guard directly. “I’m here on behalf of the police,” he said. “Mr. Barnard is wanted at Scotland Yard.”

  The guard made no move, and Barnard laughed hollowly. “Who do you think hired this gentleman, Charles? Use your intelligence. Half of the people who work in this building owe their jobs to me.” He paused. “It’s disappointing that you’ve found me so soon. I thought I had several weeks.”

  “You should have had your horseshoes changed after you pretended to go to Geneva,” said Lenox.

  Barnard didn’t respond to this. “Well, we shall speak soon enough. Westlake, take this man up to my office. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. If you want any tea, Charles, let Westlake know.” He chuckled. “Must maintain the civilities, eh?”

  Barnard’s office was small and graceful, with a beautiful view of the Thames, exactly the sort of office—second best in the building, perhaps third—that an emeritus director would have wanted. There were coinage charts on the walls, and a long bookcase was full of volumes on recondite subjects: a history of the shilling coin, the memoir of an old currency designer.

  Lenox had time to examine all of this as he and the crooked guard sat in the office, which was lit only very dimly by a single, muted lamp. He wasn’t tied up, and he still had his bag at his side. If he could get into it, then perhaps . . .

  Barnard appeared in the doorway and dismissed Westlake to the hall. He sat in the chair behind his desk and poured himself a stiff Scotch. He offered Lenox a glass, which was declined.

  Barnard was a bluff, large man, with pink coloring and a bristle of the straw-colored hair older men who have been blond in their youths develop. He had a strong chin and eyes that seemed slightly too small for his head but were undeniably sharp and intelligent. His dress tended to be pompous, if not showy, and at the moment he had on an immaculately tailored suit, which managed nonetheless to look secondhand and lived-in, comfortable. He was usually the liveliest and loudest man in the room, with a blunt, bullying manner, but now he seemed suddenly sunken, diminished.

  There was a long, long silence, during which the two men very frankly observed each other—rivals and enemies for more than a year, though only one of them had known it all that time, now finally face-to-face, both in full cognizance of the stakes. Their lives.

  Finally, after a great, heaving sigh, Barnard asked Lenox, “How did you know?”

  Lenox didn’t know what to say; he could play his cards close to the vest, or he could tell Barnard everything. Did it matter? If he did the latter, he might make time for Jenkins to come. For he felt certain Barnard planned to kill him.

  “Poole confessed to me, in fact, the other—”

  “No, no,” said Barnard. “That’s all immaterial. How did you know about—about all of it?”

  “All of it?” said Lenox.

  “Listen, Poole would never have implicated me. I beat it into him day and night that there was nothing worse than a rat. Think about his father! He confessed to the Yard—only to you did he admit that I was his friend, or that I was involved.”

  “Why should there be anything else?” asked Lenox. “The murders aren’t enough?”

  “Ever since that damn maid died in my house . . . I’m not stupid, Lenox. I could see in your eyes the revulsion you felt, feel it in your handshake, after that. Still I figured I had time . . . I thought I had time. I covered my tracks so well.” Barnard took a sip and sighed again, the sigh of a man at a crucial moment of his life, who knows that nothing can be as it was. “How did you know?”

  “It’s a difficult question to answer. I knew you stole that money, back then, and suddenly—well, nobody ever quite knew how you got your money, George, and I somehow doubted it was your first theft, especially because I knew you were connected to the Hammer Gang. I have since you set those two Hammers to thrash me, when you wanted me to stop looking into the maid’s murder. Their tattoos gave them away.”

  “You knew that?” asked Barnard, astonished. “I thought you might have an inkling—I told them again and again they should never get those laughable tattoos. Why mark yourself for what you are?” It was a philosophy that encapsulated Barnard’s rise through the world. “You knew about the Hammers and me?” he repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “Then a man died in vain.”

  Lenox felt his stomach plummet. “Exeter found out?”

  Barnard nodded. Almost casually, he pulled open a drawer of his desk and pulled a gun out of it.

  “That’s why he died in the East End near the gang’s base.”

  “Yes.”

  Lenox felt sick. “Then—why haven’t you killed me? I knew worse than he did.”

  “You’re a gentleman,” said Barnard. “I couldn’t kill a gentleman. A journalist, a police officer, perhaps—if it were crucial.”

  Lenox almost laughed. Saved at the last by Barnard’s snobbishness; saved at the last by Barnard’s insecurity about his own tenuous relations to the upper class of his nation. It was remarkable how a brilliant mind could in one aspect have been
so blind.

  “Yet you mean to now?”

  Barnard seemed to sense Lenox’s incredulousness and bridle against it. “Then there was a practical side to it. If I killed you I felt sure that letters would be instantly dispatched to the proper authorities. That what proof you had against me would be laid out—that—well, any of the ruses a clever man would have devised to ensure either his own safety or his enemy’s downfall.”

  Lenox nodded. “You were right there, but why not flee sooner, George?”

  “I knew you weren’t the precipitate sort. You would tease out whatever information you could until you were certain. I knew I had time. More time, if it weren’t for Carruthers and Exeter. It was those two who . . . hastened my plans, shall we say.”

  Here they came to it. “Why did they die?” asked Lenox in a carefully neutral voice, inviting the confidence of the man with the gun.

  Barnard laughed. “You’re awfully good, you know. I quite forgot for a moment that we were anything other than old acquaintances. No, it’s not important.” Suddenly he became businesslike. “Look, in”—he checked his pocket watch—“in fifteen minutes this will be over. Here’s some paper. Why not write a note to Jane?”

  Lenox felt a wave of panic that almost prostrated him; he thought in sudden succession of his brother, of his childhood, of his little house on Hampden Lane, and above all of Jane—and suddenly life seemed so dear and so wonderful that he would have done anything to hold on to it.

  “Simon Pierce—that was to mislead the Yard?”

  Barnard laughed yet again and checked his watch. “Yes, of course,” he said.

  “How did you find out that Carruthers and Pierce had both been witnesses against Jonathan Poole?”

  “Carruthers told me. He was a fearful talker, you know. Told me the first time we ever met, practically. Trying to impress me.”

  “He was the real target, then? Carruthers?”

  “Yes,” said Barnard. “Of course.” He looked uneasy. “I never heard much good of Pierce, either.”

  “Hiram Smalls was trying to become a Hammer?”

  “Yes.”

  “His mother’s debt?”

  This unnerved Barnard. He had been speaking in a rather bored way, but now he looked at Lenox inquiringly. “How much do you know?” he said.

  “Some.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone, of course.”

  “Of course. Only your proxies did.”

  “Well—but that’s important. Gerald Poole was a crazed young man.”

  “Who happened to run into Martha Claes, a tavernkeeper from his adolescence.”

  “Now, how in damnation do you know that?”

  “From Poole,” said Lenox. He decided to be as honest as possible. It might unsettle Barnard; might buy time.

  “Well, there’s no use denying that I had a hand in all of it.”

  “Why Carruthers, George? What did he suddenly discover?”

  Barnard looked at Lenox, again with that smirk. “He found out I was going to rob the Mint. Found out I was going to leave England.”

  “How?”

  Barnard laughed. “It’s funny, isn’t it,” he said. “Life, I mean. He found out because of an article I paid him to write. I needed some research on the architecture of this place and didn’t dare ask for it myself. I must have overplayed my hand with him. Asked him about getting in and out of here unnoticed. He twigged to it and challenged me face-to-face with what he suspected.”

  “He threatened to expose you?”

  “Yes,” said Barnard. “Unless I paid him.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I would have. He knew too much, though.”

  Suddenly a man in a low black cloth cap came in. “Ready,” he said, not sparing a glance for Lenox.

  Barnard did, however, and grinned. “Coins are awfully heavy things,” he said, almost as if he were showing off.

  “Notes?” said Lenox.

  “White notes are quite lovely. We meant to come back tomorrow night, too, but why be greedy?” He laughed loudly and then turned back to his man.

  A dozen years ago, the pound and two-pound notes of England had been handwritten; now they were printed in black on the front, with a blank white back. They would be infinitely more portable, of course. With any concerted effort Barnard might make off with a hundred thousand pounds, enough to make his entire career of thievery irrelevant by comparison.

  “Don’t do this, George,” said Lenox.

  Barnard ignored him. “All loaded?” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Then all of a sudden two things happened.

  In the hallway a voice—Jenkins’s voice—shouted, “Lenox! Where are you? The building is surrounded, Mr. Barnard!”

  Lenox, taking advantage of the surprise and consternation on the faces of Barnard and his compatriot, pulled from his leather kit bag a tiny, pearl-handled revolver, which held one bullet—and shot George Barnard, certain that it would have been the other way around if he waited a moment longer.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  B

  arnard shouted, “Run!” and, clutching his stomach, turned and bolted before Lenox could reload.

  The two men sprinted away, and Lenox got to his feet, reloaded the tiny gun, and started after them. Jenkins’s loud footsteps were pounding toward the noise, and at the door to Barnard’s office the two men met.

  “That way!” said Lenox.

  It was to no avail. They searched the building’s every hall, and in two or three minutes police constables were swarming the place. They found nothing, other than a vault left half open.

  Lenox and Jenkins went out to the courtyard, where Graham was waiting. A trio of constables rushed to Jenkins and reported that they had found nothing.

  “Damn it!” said Jenkins, looking hopelessly in every direction. “They’ve simply vanished! We had men on every block, at every exit! Where on earth did they go?”

  “They must still be in the building,” said one of the constables.

  Suddenly Lenox saw it. “No,” he said. “The river. They’ve gone by boat.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am. Carruthers’s article about the Mint—all the hidden passageways. It’s like the Tower of London. There must be a tunnel or a gate leading directly onto the water.”

  “Christ,” muttered Jenkins. “We must put in for a boat from the Yard.”

  “There’s no time for that,” said Lenox. “Will you lend me two men?”

  “Of course,” said Jenkins. “What do you mean to do?”

  “For a dozen reasons they can only be headed east, out of town, rather than west and back through the heart of London. We’ll follow them.”

  “Why are you so sure they’re going east?”

  Impatiently Lenox ticked off the reasons. “The Thames is only a few hundred yards wide in London—they’d be far too conspicuous. They’ll want to unload somewhere quiet—again east. Barnard as much as admitted he’s leaving England—the eastern coast.”

  As if by confirmation of all this, a constable came sprinting toward Jenkins and breathlessly told him that Barnard and his men had been spotted on a makeshift barge but that it was already out of sight.

  “Two men?” said Lenox.

  “I’m coming, too,” said Jenkins. “Althorp, you stay here and manage the men. Send a team down east in a carriage to look for the barge and track their progress. I’m coming, Lenox.”

  “As am I,” said a voice behind them in the courtyard.

  It was Dallington.

  “How did you discover us?” asked Lenox.

  Dallington laughed. “I have to confess—I followed Jenkins. My man was watching the Yard. I couldn’t stand being outside of things. Where are we going?”

  There was no time to be upset with Dallington, and in a way Lenox admired his pluck. Soon they had organized a small party, and, running the short distance to the river, Lenox found the smallest, quickest skiff he could, cut it loose, an
d left Graham behind with money to pay its owner. He, Jenkins, Dallington, and two constables boarded the skiff and instantly started to push out into the wide, rippling Thames.

  For twenty minutes there was nothing. They took turns poling the lively little bark down the river, sticking close to the side and peering keenly forward.

  “Damned cheek,” said Dallington indignantly. “To think of him stealing from the Mint!”

  “It’s the brazenest sainted thing I ever heared o’,” said one of the constables, his voice almost tinged with admiration.

  “He was the only man in the nation who could have pulled it off,” said Jenkins anxiously. “Before this is all over you have to explain it to me, Charles.”

  “Yes,” murmured Lenox. He was less full of chat than the others; he had not thirty minutes before shot a man with whom he had shared port, at whose table he had dined, with whom he had played cards. He hoped passionately that they might catch him, but also that Barnard might still be alive when they did.

  Dawn began to glimmer and rise. It came first as a lightening above the horizon, and then the dark pulled back to reveal a pink and purple range of clouds. It was bitterly cold on the water.

  Then they came around a bend in the river and saw it, as big as life.

  It was a small red barge, which sat low in the water; it had pulled to the left side of the river now, where a sandy embankment threatened to ground it. The barge’s virtue was readily apparent—four small but very heavy-looking crates stood at the edge of the deck, next to a ramp that extended from its side.

  There were five men on deck. Barnard was sitting against the cabin’s outer door, directing the others with his left hand, clutching his right to his stomach. The other four men were engaged in stopping the boat and readying the crates to be off-loaded.

  It was a good location, lying as it did in the fields between two villages, only two miles east of London’s outer limits; for all Lenox knew, Barnard might have bought these fields. There was a dray cart with two horses before it standing on the bank and a single man in black holding their reins.

  “The devil,” said Dallington under his breath.